With increasing demands for digital libraries and electronic documents, a large number of documents having physical carriers (such as paper documents and film documents) need to be scanned and converted into electronic documents with a designated format by a document image processing system (DIPS). However, an important step of the document image processing system often requires to determine automatically directions of the document from the scanned document image (for example, four candidate directions: from left to right, from right to left, from bottom to top, and from top to bottom). And the performance of performing the determination process often influences the overall performance of the document image processing system.
There are mainly the following two types of existing determination methods. One type of determination method is a method based on an graphic feature, and the other is a method based on Optical Character Recognition (OCR).